Sunday, November 22, 2015

Cheetah

I colored the cheetahs first before I got started on the rest of the googley gang

Among the fastest creatures on earth, and inarguably the fastest on land, the running cheetahs of Kerby Rosanes was a joy to do. The color wasn't the hard part, practically just one shade, it was instead determining the highlights and shadows that went with the muscle movements. I studied about 10 photos of running cheetahs that I've downloaded from the internet to see how their powerful muscles contracted and relaxed as they zipped through the wastelands of their habitats.

One day I'm going to put a background on this spread. When I did this I wasn't that into backgrounds yet, haven't gained the confidence to attack those mighty white spaces that left everything to the imagination. Come to think of it I should really do that to reintroduce my old works with a new dimension.

One thing I'd like to mention about the color choices on the fur, there were some cheetahs that were more gray than orange. I wanted to introduce that in the last, smaller cheetah in the picture but decided against it since it was a fail, it looked like I didn't try that hard to color it haha! I reshaded it orangey, which was actually mostly the khaki shade in my Colleen pen. The orange was only used as a base to deepen some parts.